Friday, September 30, 2016

Vocabulary
Test:The
president said the bill
permitting Americans to sue Saudi Arabia could
erode the concept of sovereign immunity, not
onlymaking
American
citizens and their
assets
abroad vulnerable to lawsuits, but
leaving
the American government and its leaders “exposed
to liabilities for all the work that we're doing all around the
world.” Define
'work.'

Yardstick:
By most
measures, the Fed's last 7 years have not produced stellar results,
but it got the intended result: It inflated asset prices and saved
Wall Street from its stupidity and criminality.

Faint
Praise:Six
prominent climate change scientists have warned the world's leaders
that signing the Paris agreement was at
best well intentioned words
and that if actual serious steps are not promptly taken, global
temperatures will surpass the 2°C
mark
by 2050. They stressed that the cuts and curbs promised in Paris are
simply not enough, “not even close.”

In
Short:
“Donald
Trump oozes contempt for the status quo.” Trump's
pronouncements on
trade
and the economy are not true, nor are his promised actions remotely
plausible. This does not matter for
it speaks
to the pain and anger felt in many former
manufacturing centers. And
that's
what gets him votes.

House
That?Since
1999 home prices have risen 76% while household income has grown less
than 2%; you
do the math.

Your
Move:
One thing that voting for a thrid-party candidate could accomplish
is to deprive the winning mainstream candidate of enough votes to
prevent the pretense of some sort of 'mandate'. Splitting your vote
between the top of the ticket and the Congresscritters may go a long
way towards creating
a
totally ineffective administration, which might not be such a bad
thing. If you think one or the other of these jokers is godawful,
think how much worse it would be if the same party controlled the
White House and Congress.

5 comments:

Your Move: A rhetorical question if there ever was one considering we have been reduced to a single party since 'Morning in America'!

There are no Democrats anymore, the only thing remaining is their 'platform' which none of them actually expect to adhere to.

The 'obstructionist' Republican's exist to block governance [read regulation] and lead the 'hand wringing' when it comes to marginal social issues while those who call themselves Democrats fulfill the role of 'enablers' for the military/industrial/prison complex.

I'm telling you folks, holding your nose just isn't going to cut it this time because anything even remotely resembling 'sanity' isn't on the table.

Re vocabulary. Oh, THOSE consequences. Kinda like every other major international law - war crimes, munitions sales, money laundering, funding terrorism, elections transparency, climate change ... oh wait, you mean the law would apply to us as well?!

Re Your move. I have been voting Green with a clear conscience since 2000. The arguments of the party hacks to try and scold us back in line are thin, insulting, and further evidence that they feel entitled to our vote and forgotten that elections are supposed to be won, by earning votes through effectiveness and responsiveness.

Every vote for a Dem at this point is an endorsement of the worst long-term failure in modern political history. Even baseball teams change the manager when the club refuses to win.

I would love to see a national effort - VoteThird - encourage everyone to vote for a third party, any third party, whatever one that approximates your general policy orientation, or even the Monster Raving Looney party.

FYI. I came across NPR's "fact check" of the first debate. Man, it's such a pro-Hillary pile-on, it's freaking embarrassing. I'm not saying that Trump doesn't float some easy target, while Hillary is much more practiced at making safer platitude assertions. But read it for yourself.

Half the comments are merely endorsed Hillary's vague platitudes, not checking facts. In the few cases where they corrected her, they also offered a helpful "however", as opposed to the few cases where they agreed with Trump, which inevitably came with an "except" addenda to find a way to make him wrong anyway. The rest of the comments were gratuitous snide comments directed at Trump, reaching for something negative to say that didn't even pretend to be checking facts.

It was awful. But the way, where were all those outspoken critics in the press during the Bush administration?

Beyond opening the door to lawsuits by family members of drone victims, I think there is more at stake for our government by opening the door to litigation and the presentation of evidence in a court of law. I realize people are very touchy about this subject, but if you accept the possibility that individuals in the Saudi government (our ally) played a role in the attacks, you cannot rule out complicity by some US citizens. People have a visceral revulsion to this insinuation; what strikes me as odd is that they don't bother to look into it. There's a large amount of information available, some totally absurd, some quite compelling. What I'm saying is that if it is such a preposterous idea, then there is no harm in looking into it and being able to say that you've informed yourself are able to reject these theories, rather than rejecting them outright. I'm sorry.

Obama fibs again: Libya under Qaddafi? Anyone remember that Congress waived State Immunity for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland -- so much for president being set by allowing Saudi Arabia to be sued.

Our Motto

Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.